Followers

Thursday, March 31, 2016

Gabriel Nderitu wants to fly. The 49 year
old amateur airplane builder from Othaya has become an annual fixture on our TV
screens as he tries out yet another of his contraptions that stubbornly won’t
get off the ground. By 2014, Gabriel had reportedly spent a million shillings on his frustrated passion. And though we can't help but admire his chutzpah
and determination, it is curious that over a century after the Wright brothers
flew at Kitty Hawk, Gabriel, and several others like him across Kenya, are not
soaring.

The answer probably has something to do
with Kenya's peculiar approach to learning. With a conference underway in Nairobi to discuss
the scrapping of the 8-4-4 system of education, there is a marked preference
for “practical” as opposed to “book” learning. Opening the conference, Deputy
President William Ruto railed against university classrooms that teach Vasco da
Gama but not how to fix a lamp. One radio station tweeted: “Kenyans propose
curriculum system that emphasizes on skills not theory & exams”.

"Theory" has become a dirty word. Yet it, or
rather the lack of it, is perhaps the reason why Gabriel and his friends are staying
grounded for now. It is also the reason why Kenyan dreams of economic and
political success have yet to take fight. This was well illustrated last week in
the reaction to an opinion piece by Dr David Ndii.

That the article made for uncomfortable
reading is an understatement. Dr Ndii’s proposal that Kenya consider
balkanising into ethnic statelets in the event of a post-election conflagration
triggered by a “sham” 2017 poll, had many frothing at the mouth and calling for
his arrest. It has also led to an earnest debate about what nationhood is and
why Kenya has seemingly failed to propagate a successful national narrative.

Many of the explanations put forward lay
the blame on ethnicity. “The tribe has eaten the nation,” Dr Ndii wrote. He Kenyan
elite, he argues, has preferred a tribal discourse and spurned several
opportunities to nurture a national one. He sees Kenyan tribes in an abusive
relationship with one another and proposes dissolution of the marriage as a
viable option. Other, while not going so far, still accept that the basic
problem is one of tribe versus nation.

However, this is lazy thinking and the frameworks
employed obscure rather than explain the true nature of our problems. For the
Kenyan people are not in an abusive marriage with each other. They are in an
abusive relationship with their governing elites. The underlying reality is one
of a state created by the British to extract resources from the local
population and feed them up to an elite few. This state, which preys on
wananchi for the benefit of wenyenchi has not been fundamentally reformed since
independence.

"Will the elite which has inherited
power from the colonialists use that power to bring about the necessary social
and economic changes or will they … become part of the Old Establishment?"
the future President, Mwai Kibaki, asked in 1964.

History has shown that they chose the
latter path. As noted by Professor Daniel Branch in his book Kenya: Between Hope and Despair, “elites
have encouraged Kenyans to think and act politically in a manner informed first
and foremost by ethnicity, in order to crush demands for the redistribution of
scarce resources.”

In using tribe as opposed to class to frame
their analysis, Dr Ndii and many of his detractors fall into this trap. They
fail to see that that the problem is not one of tribes robbing each other, but
of a ravenous elite stealing from everybody else and hyping ethnicity to cover
their tracks.

Far from wasting time, better theorising would
lead to better solutions and learning from history is critical to not repeating
past mistakes. Like Gabriel, if Kenya is to reach for the sky, it would do well
to spend at least as much time thinking through theories of how things work as
it does tinkering in the backyard.

Thursday, March 24, 2016

Thomas Hobbes, the 17th Century
English philosopher, used the term "Leviathan" to refer to a
government, inspired by the Biblical description in the Book of Job, Chapter 41
of a huge sea-creature possessing tremendous strength and power. While Hobbes
obviously admired the Leviathan’s power, it is clear that it was a creature to
be feared. “Any hope of subduing him is false” warns the Bible.

In Kenya, taming this beast has been a
consistent preoccupation of pro-independence and human rights activists for at
least three generations. It has been long acknowledged that the conduct of
people in government and the policies the state undertook were the single
largest determinants of either the quality of life citizens enjoyed or the
suffering they were forced to endure.

Given this, the concentration of power at
the centre, in the hands of a few within the government, and primarily in the
hands of the President, was diagnosed as the problem. The obvious solution then
was to decentralize functions from the Presidency to other institutions and to
devolve them from central government to county governments.

However, it seems, little thought was given
to the concentration of power in government itself. Because the government we
inherited from the British was all powerful, we appear to have taken for
granted the centrality of its position in the lives of Kenyans. The unstated
assumption was that by decentralizing and devolving functions within
government, by bringing it closer to the people so to speak, we would make the citizenry
more powerful.

But it has not turned out that way. We didn’t
give the people more power; we gave them more government and kept power firmly ensconced
in the hands of the devolved state. Not only do the people now have to shell
out much more money to support this new structure, but we have also devolved
and decentralized many of Nairobi’s bad habits, from theft of public resources
to impunity for the perpetrators.

In the book, The Real Politics of the
Horn of Africa, Alex de Waal shows how elite capture and control of
government in the region more closely resembles a criminal enterprise than
democratic politics. It is a perfect description of what is happening both at national and now, county, levels. Far from serving the people, state structures have become tools
for elites seeking opportunities to loot and to reward their supporters.

Further, despite, or perhaps because of devolution,
government continues to play an outsized role in the lives of citizens. The state’s behaviour, not individual merit,
hard work or ingenuity, remains the most important factor for the people’s
circumstances. Proximity to it is what determines winners and losers, who lives
and who dies. It is no accident that any list of the richest Kenyans is
dominated by politicians and government functionaries and that their poorest
counterparts tend to be those whom government has either ignored or
deliberately marginalized. Far from returning the power to the people, we have
actually entrenched their dependence even further.

The problem is we have failed to encourage the growth of alternative centres of power, not within, but outside of the state.
We have allowed it to monopolize power and crowd out everybody else. We have
allowed it to systematically undermine any potential competitors. We have acquiesced
in the subjugation of the media, trade unions, organized civil society,
business and even the church, to the dictates of government.

It is thus not surprising that everyone
seems to want to be in government and every community wants to control it. It
is Kenya’s Number One growth industry, a nationwide pyramid scheme, with
benefits percolating upwards. The higher you go, the richer it becomes.

Today the government purports to prescribe to adults how and whom they can love, what and when they are allowed to drink, even what they may say or think. Worse, there has sprung up an entire industry dedicated to push the idea that government knows best, that we are its wards and should not question it, even when it breaks the law.

We should be worried when our
professionals, clergy, and governance activists all see joining government as the
summit of achievement. We have failed to learn from the experience of 2002 when
we decapitated the civil society movement and installed its entire leadership
in government. Just as we failed to learn from the co-option of the labour
movement by government in the 1960s. Today, as the clergy flocks to the
government, the state is trying to regulate who can minister in a church and
what can be taught in a mosque. Our once vibrant media has been reduced to
parroting the “Official Truth” even as former newsmen dine at the table of
state.

The truth of Wendell Phillips’ declaration rings
clear: "The hand entrusted with power becomes, either from human depravity
or esprit de corps, the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continual
oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a
despot."

Continual oversight requires powerful
actors outside the government who are able to challenge it. It also requires an
empowered citizenry that is able to resist the predations of the state. We must
create and incentivize the habitation of non-governmental spaces. And to do
this, we must give Kenyans true independence, not just a bigger say in how the
Leviathan runs their lives.

Monday, March 07, 2016

Kenyan media is going through a torrid time. Once described
as one of the most vibrant and critical on the continent, it is today looking
like little more than a shadow of its former self. From the firing, reportedly
at the behest of the state, of editors and journalists at the country’s two leading
newspapers, The Daily Nation and The Standard, to the anodyne and superficial
coverage of governmental malfeasance, media in Kenya appears to have raised the
white flag of surrender.

It must be particularly humiliating for our veteran journalists,
many of whom cut their teeth standing up to and exposing the ills of the
dictatorship of Daniel Arap Moi only to see their publications succumb to the
supposedly more democratic regimes that succeeded it. It is a sign that despite
all the reforms that have been enacted, including the adoption of a new progressive
constitution, little has changed in the fundamental dynamic between the rulers
and the ruled. Kenya still very much remains a country of wenyenchi and
wananchi.

And every so often, when one peers behind the timid
headlines, one is reminded of this.

This week, the newspapers reported on the now “retired” Mr
Moi apparently “breaking his long silence” to warn that corruption under the
Uhuru Kenyatta administration was “getting out of hand” and to “urge Kenyans to
help the government to wage the war on graft.” Now, the irony will not be lost
on many Kenyans: the man who presided over a 24-year kleptocracy, and who is
still allowed to enjoy the illicit fruit undisturbed, today calls corruption “this
bad thing”. Talk about glass houses and throwing stones!

However underneath the comical rubbish that is Mr Moi’s
condemnation of graft, lies a gem. For the aging kleptocrat unwittingly offers
valuable insight into how Kenya’s ruling and still thieving elite sees its own
corruption. And why so little has changed since he left power.

“You know corruption is bad . . . I am appealing to all
Christians to help the government eliminate this bad thing… If you are [a] senior
government [official] anywhere, please help in stopping this bad thing that is
giving the government a bad image,” he is reported as saying.

Notice that Mr Moi is not particularly distressed by the
misery graft has visited on Kenyans. The fact that corruption has destroyed lives
and livelihoods, robbed kids of their future and impoverished millions pales
into significance compared with the fact that it has given "the government
a bad image". Further, the talk of it "getting out of hand"
appears to imply that some level of abuse of public office for private gain is fine.
Graft, it seems, is only bad when many officials do it, causing government to
get blamed. Mr Moi appears to pine for the good old days when the eating was
"in control".

In his eyes, corruption is not a vice to be eliminated. It
is a resource to be managed lest over-exploitation causes disaffection, either
among the people or, more likely given his history, among the donors. Thus the
problem is not that corruption kills or impoverishes. The real crime is in
exposing it and giving government "a bad image".

One only has to compare this to the prevailing rhetoric from
the Kenyatta administration and its communications minions, to appreciate that
it is the prevalent view among our ruling elite. Late last year, Kenyans loudly
demanding a proper accounting of the Kshs 200b the government had borrowed via
a Eurobond were warned that their questions, not the government’s inability to
provide convincing answers, were sabotaging the economy. On social media sites,
criticism of government is being equated with a destructive negativity, and the
media is constantly being urged to opt for “positive” news.

Thus coverage of the plunder of Kenya’s wildlife is more
likely to steer clear of the government’s role in protecting poachers and to
focus attention on the fact that President Kenyatta has invited A-list
Hollywood celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio to witness the burning of Kenya’s
ivory stockpile.

Similarly, GoK has tended to deal with insecurity and
terrorism primarily as threats to its image, not as threats to the lives of
Kenyans. The failure to institute a promised public inquiry into security lapses
and response failures linked to the September 2013 Westgate attack can be
attributed squarely to the imperative to protect government’s “good name” and avoid
accountability. A similar dynamic is at work in the two-month silence over the casualties
of the Al Shabaab attack on a Kenyan-manned AMISOM base in El Adde, Somalia.

The effective binning in Parliament of the report of the Truth,
Justice and Reconciliation Commission also illustrates the elite belief that historical
injustices can be solved via transient political arrangements and empty
rhetoric about "restorative justice".

It all boils down to the conflation of Kenyans’ troubles
with those of its politicians. In this formulation, citizens don't have
bread-and-butter issues. They have "political problems" requiring
"political solutions". An ethnic community’s welfare is improved, and
its poverty vicariously eradicated, by granting its political sons opportunities
to “eat” public resources. And conversely, it is impoverished by their
exclusion from the feast.

Thus the response of the Jubilee government to allegations
of corruption, which has essentially been to point out that the leaders of the
opposition CORD coalition are similarly implicated, is entirely understandable.Because,
as Mr Moi has revealed, the problem is not that public money has been stolen,
but that the government is getting blamed for it. And the reason why so little has changed since he left power is that this continues to be the problem Kenyan politicians are grappling with.